rude

A Delta flight from L.A. to Florida had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque, NM on Friday, after a first class passenger sprayed people with a water bottle from the beverage cart, threatened to “bring down” the plane, and shouted, “Get behind me Satan,” apparently referring to a flight attendant.

UPS has pledged to fix the problem with their drivers lofting Ryan’s packages through the air and over the fence to smash on the concrete. After Ryan’s complaint went up, UPS contacted Consumerist, and we put them in touch with Ryan. They are also apparently going to work on the whole leaving packages to soak in the rain thing. Hurray.

Laura has a pretty good description of what an anxiety attack feels like to her: “First, your chest starts to feel tight, like you are wearing a corset. You can’t breathe properly, your heart rate starts to skyrocket, causing a pounding feeling. It’s very out-of-body. You can’t figure out what’s going on. It’s like being trapped by your brain into a tight corner.” If the skeptical gate agent for Continental had ever experienced this–or had just been given adequate training for dealing with passengers with disabilities–maybe she wouldn’t have told Laura her doctor’s note looked fake, or asked her to stay put when Laura said she needed to get her meds.

Larry says that he opened a can of chef boyardee recently only to find a horrible giant mold world growing inside. When he contacted the store he bought it from, Walmart, a low-level employee was openly hostile to them and said the manager “wouldn’t believe them.” Yes, that’s the new scam: steal a can of food, open it up, grow a massive mold culture inside it for several weeks, then try to return it for a buck oh nine.

Frank, one of the Geniuses at Tim’s nearby Apple store, was kind of an ass to Tim and his wife when they brought in their iMac to replace it. Luckily, a woman at Apple’s corporate office actually responded to Tim’s complaint and provided excellent customer service.

According to Richard, Greyhound has some real work to do when it comes to making people in wheelchairs not feel like second-class citizens. Even in snowy weather and with delays, you don’t really want a driver telling a passenger that he should have brought an attendant if he wanted to get on the bus.

Some retailers, like CVS, reward their customers for using reusable shopping bags. Others, like Macy’s and Borders, sort of do the opposite. Reader Jennifer says that this happened to her. A local Bath & Body Works store wouldn’t sell her anything if she stubbornly insisted in putting her purchase inside one of the bags she already had. Wait, isn’t she saving the store money by not taking a bag?

Amanda has been having a hard time getting Macy’s to reverse an incorrect charge on her credit card–a charge that was canceled less than five minutes after it was made last week. Her story includes almost all of the things that can go wrong with customer support, including random transfers, rude employees, and broken promises. If she’d just been made to hold for 45 minutes before one of the disconnections, she’d have collected the set!

Last week, Daynah wrote about how she was forced to stop writing anything down during a recent shopping trip to the cosmetics store Ulta. At the time, Daynah grudgingly gave in because she really wanted to make a purchase (she tests products for consumers). But once she left the store, she took the fight back to Ulta.

In a world where smartphones can shoot video, snap photos, record audio, scan barcodes, and let you make price comparisons via text message, it’s almost funny to run into a paranoid manager like the one at an Ulta makeup store in Seattle. Well, funny except for that petty tyrant part where she tells you that you’ll have to take your old-school pen and papers out to the car and come back empty handed before she’ll sell you any makeup.

One of the unfortunate things about Crohn’s disease is it can make you need to use the bathroom pretty much immediately, without warning or fanfare. Of course, there’s plenty of fanfare afterward if you can’t find a bathroom, as one longtime customer of Plaid Pantry found out yesterday when she shat her pants in the parking lot after being denied emergency access to their employee toilet.

U-Haul apparently knows about Ryder’s initiative to outdo it on suckage, so they’ve introduced a whole new class of customer abuse: false imprisonment. Best of all, the employee who was sent to let Jessica and her friend out of U-Haul Prison told them that if they hadn’t wanted to get locked in after 5pm, they should have paid for 24 hour access. (They were taking advantage of a complimentary offer from the company.)

[Note: Sandals has already responded to the post, expressed sympathy, and reached out to Autumn. We’ve removed their name from the headline to more accurately focus the blame on Delta, which is the company really behind the problems.] We get that Delta employees just flat out hate their jobs at this point—that would explain the surly flight attendants on my last Delta flight, at any rate—but why would you take that out on newlyweds, who have their whole lives to be disappointed and deserve that one week of happiness at the start? The least you could do, angry Delta employees, is try to help out after your employer utterly fails to deliver the passengers anywhere near their destination. No, a dingy one-night stay in a hotel room in NYC is not the same as a week in Antigua.

Everyone who’s over the age of 3 and not a lifelong vegan has surely had a confrontation with a haughty fast-food manager. Danny and his family threw down with a Wendy’s honcho who tried to get all Studio 54 with them — resulting in a hastily filled-out free burger coupon and a near denial of its redemption — but it looks as though Danny gave as good as he received.